Rock Band 4 One-ups Guitar Hero Live: Supports Old Guitar Hero Gear

Guitar Hero Live won't support your old Guitar Hero instruments... but Rock Band 4 will happily take them.

Guitar Hero Live and Rock Band 4 have only just been announced, and already shots are being fired in the war of plastic instruments. While Harmonix is planning on having Rock Band 4 be backwards compatible, Activision made it clear that Guitar Hero Live would not support any of your old gear. So time to throw out all your old Guitar Hero guitars, right? Wrong. Harmonix has announced that as well as supporting old Rock Band instruments, it would also be supporting old Guitar Hero ones.

"We're planning to support everything that we can: That includes all of the old Rock Band controllers, and all the old Guitar Hero controllers," project director Daniel Sussman told Business Insider in an interview.

"Our position is really all about respect for our consumers and for the money that they have spent to get into the game space in the first place. They spend a fortune on games: on consoles, on hardware, and we're sensitive to that. We play those games too. We buy all the same stuff. A world where you need to have three different guitars and two drum sets and all this stuff is...we don't want to support that world," Sussman continued.

To be fair to Guitar Hero, the new title will use a completely redesigned guitar with six buttons instead of the traditional five... but Sussman is already thinking about patching support for it into Rock Band. "I don't see anything on it that makes me think that we couldn't figure out a way to support it," he says. "And yet I won't know for sure until we get one in the office."